12.13.2010

Zynga Japan released its flagship social game "FarmVille" in Japan under the name "ファームビレッジ(FarmVillage)" on December 1. Why is it Village not Ville? According to Zynga Japan general manager Shintaro Yamada's tweet [J], "Because the pronunciation of FarmVille and Building looks like in Japanese".

SoftBank finances Zynga Japan. And FarmVillage was released in SNS "mixi" of the biggest in Japan.

12.10.2010

On December 2nd, Japan first social game magazine "Appli-Style"[J] has been released. Costs 680 JPY (about 8USD). It's sold at bookstores and convenience stores.

The main contents are japanese social games of mixi, MobageTown Yahoo! Mobage, GREE, and Colopl(Location-based mobile social game) introductions. The most are social games for Japanese mobile.

The volume of contents are almost the same as the console game magazine! And I thought in this way. The movement of open platform in Japan was delayed from foreign countries one year or more. mixi became a social platform in August, 2009.After that, social game magazine is released in this way. What such a lot of social games can play "only in Japanese mobile" is abnormal.

If all of these Japanese social games become multilingual and can play with Facebook or smartphone, revolution will happen for a social game business.

12.07.2010

I went to coterie magazine spot sale "Bungaku flea market"[J] the day before yesterday. "Bungaku flea market" is n event of literature literary coterie magazine. A lot of amateur writers were selling a handmade book. It was so fun! Interestingly, there were a lot of iPad, iPhone and Kindle! :) It is the first time to see such a lot of gadgets in the coterie magazine spot sale event! :)

Japanese coterie magazine writers are doing the attempt to make coterie magazine by using Twitter. It's interesting.Moreover, a lot of Japanese coterie magazine writers make works e-book and are selling it.

This might still be movement only of the novel coterie magazine. But, it might be infected with the comic coterie magazine at once.

CyberAgent might be known as a developer of AmebaPigg and AmebaPico in foreign countries. But they are originally Internet advertising agencies, and administer the maximum blog portal site "Ameba Blog" in Japan.

You can check Japanese Visual-Kei artist's official blog, photos, news, AmebaPigg avatar and virtual goods in "Ame-visu".

You can change the site to an English by the Google translation. But it is not correct. (Even if anyone uses any kind of translation site, it is impossible to translate Japanese precisely...)